by R. S. Thomas
Yet no bridge joins her own
World with yours, all you can do
Is lean kindly across the abyss
To hear words that were once wise.
Too Late
I would have spared you this, Prytherch;
You were like a child to me.
I would have seen you poor and in rags,
Rather than wealthy and not free.
The rain and wind are hard masters;
I have known you wince under their lash.
But there was comfort for you at the day’s end
Dreaming over the warm ash
Of a turf fire on a hill farm.
Contented with your accustomed ration
Of bread and bacon, and drawing your strength
From membership of an old nation
Not given to beg. But look at yourself
Now, a servant hired to flog
The life out of the slow soil,
Or come obediently as a dog
To the pound’s whistle. Can’t you see
Behind the smile on the times’ face
The cold brain of the machine
That will destroy you and your race?
Hireling
Cars pass him by; he’ll never own one.
Men won’t believe in him for this.
Let them come into the hills
And meet him wandering a road,
Fenced with rain, as I have now;
The wind feathering his hair;
The sky’s ruins, gutted with fire
Of the late sun, smouldering still.
Nothing is his, neither the land
Nor the land’s flocks. Hired to live
On hills too lonely, sharing his hearth
With cats and hens, he has lost all
Property but the grey ice
Of a face splintered by life’s stone.
Poet’s Address to the Businessmen
Gentlemen all
At the last crumbfall,
The set of glasses,
The moist eye,
I rise to speak
Of things irrelevant:
The poem shut,
Uneasy fossil,
In the mind’s rock;
The growth of winter
In the thick wood
Of history; music
We might have heard
In the heart’s cloisters.
I speak of wounds
Not dealt us; blows
That left no bruises
On the white table
Cloth. Forgive me
The tongue’s failure,
In all this leanness
Of time, to arrive
Nearer the bone.
Those Others
A gofid gwerin gyfan
Yn fy nghri fel taerni tân.
Dewi Emrys
I have looked long at this land,
Trying to understand
My place in it – why,
With each fertile country
So free of its room,
This was the cramped womb
At last took me in
From the void of unbeing.
Hate takes a long time
To grow in, and mine
Has increased from birth;
Not for the brute earth
That is strong here and clean
And plain in its meaning
As none of the books are
That tell but of the war
Of heart with head, leaving
The wild birds to sing
The best songs; I find
This hate’s for my own kind,
For men of the Welsh race
Who brood with dark face
Over their thin navel
To learn what to sell;
Yet not for them all either,
There are still those other
Castaways on a sea
Of grass, who call to me,
Clinging to their doomed farms;
Their hearts though rough are warm
And firm, and their slow wake
Through time bleeds for our sake.
Portrait
You never asked what he was like,
That man, Prytherch. Did you class him
With other labourers, breaking the wild
Mare of the soil with bare knuckles
And gnarled thighs, knowing him shut
In cold arenas between hedges
With no audience, a man for whom
The stars’ bridle was hung too high?
He was in rags; you were right there.
But the blood was fanned by the sharp draught
Of winter into a huge blaze
In the cheeks’ grate, and eyes that you might
Have fancied brown from their long gazing
Downward were of a hard blue,
So shrill they would not permit the ear
To hear what the lips’ slobber intended.
Hyddgen
The place, Hyddgen;
The time, the fifth
Century since Glyn Dŵr
Was here with his men.
He beat the English.
Does it matter now
In the rain? The English
Don’t want to come:
Summer country.
The Welsh too:
A barren victory.
Look at those sheep,
On such small bones
The best mutton,
But not for him,
The hireling shepherd.
History goes on;
On the rock the lichen
Records it: no mention
Of them, of us.
Lore
Job Davies, eighty-five
Winters old, and still alive
After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons.
Miserable? Kick my arse!
It needs more than the rain’s hearse,
Wind-drawn, to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.
What’s living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge,
Nerves strengthened with tea,
Peat-black, dawn found me
Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew.
Rhythm of the long scythe
Kept this tall frame lithe.
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls.
Live large, man, and dream small.
Mother and Son
At nine o’clock in the morning
My son said to me:
Mother, he said, from the wet streets
The clouds are removed and the sun walks
Without shoes on the warm pavements.
There are girls biddable at the corners
With teeth cleaner than your white plates;
The sharp clatter of your dishes
Is less pleasant to me than their laughter.
The day is building; before its bright walls
Fall in dust, let me go
Beyond the front garden without you
To find glasses unstained by tears,
To find mirrors that do not reproach
My smooth face; to hear above the town’s
Din life roaring in the veins.
Pharisee.
Twentieth Century
Lord, I was not as most men.
When they were working, fighting, drinking,
I was in the greenwood, thinking
Thought to the bone. Down through my pen
The heart’s poetry like blood ran.
When some were in their cars, swanking,
I was on my two knees, thanking
For such grace as I had then.
They felt so, too. Many the jests
From hale lungs and deep chests,
From broad bodies too well to care.
My long face, my long hair
Took them in;
smugly they laughed,
Souls guttering in the grave’s draught.
A Welsh Testament
All right, I was Welsh. Does it matter?
I spoke the tongue that was passed on
To me in the place I happened to be,
A place huddled between grey walls
Of cloud for at least half the year.
My word for heaven was not yours.
The word for hell had a sharp edge
Put on it by the hand of the wind
Honing, honing with a shrill sound
Day and night. Nothing that Glyn Dŵr
Knew was armour against the rain’s
Missiles. What was descent from him?
Even God had a Welsh name:
We spoke to him in the old language;
He was to have a peculiar care
For the Welsh people. History showed us
He was too big to be nailed to the wall
Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him
Between the boards of a black book.
Yet men sought us despite this.
My high cheek-bones, my length of skull
Drew them as to a rare portrait
By a dead master. I saw them stare
From their long cars, as I passed knee-deep
In ewes and wethers. I saw them stand
By the thorn hedges, watching me string
The far flocks on a shrill whistle.
And always there was their eyes’ strong
Pressure on me: You are Welsh, they said;
Speak to us so; keep your fields free
Of the smell of petrol, the loud roar
Of hot tractors; we must have peace
And quietness.
Is a museum
Peace? I asked. Am I the keeper
Of the heart’s relics, blowing the dust
In my own eyes? I am a man;
I never wanted the drab rôle
Life assigned me, an actor playing
To the past’s audience upon a stage
Of earth and stone; the absurd label
Of birth, of race hanging askew
About my shoulders. I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning in the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?
Which?
And Prytherch – was he a real man,
Rolling his pain day after day
Up life’s hill? Was he a survival
Of a lost past, wearing the times’
Shabbier casts-off, refusing to change
His lean horse for the quick tractor?
Or was a wish to have him so
Responsible for his frayed shape?
Could I have said he was the scholar
Of the fields’ pages he turned more slowly
Season by season, or nature’s fool.
Born to blur with his moist eye
The clear passages of a book
You came to finger with deft touch?
Here
I am a man now.
Pass your hand over my brow,
You can feel the place where the brains grow.
I am like a tree,
From my top boughs I can see
The footprints that led up to me.
There is blood in my veins
That has run clear of the stain
Contracted in so many loins.
Why, then, are my hands red
With the blood of so many dead?
Is this where I was misled?
Why are my hands this way
That they will not do as I say?
Does no God hear when I pray?
I have nowhere to go.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow.
It is too late to start
For destinations not of the heart.
I must stay here with my hurt.
Alpine
About mountains it is useless to argue,
You have either been up or you haven’t;
The view from half-way is nobody’s view.
The best flowers are mostly at the top
Under a ledge, nourished by wind.
A sense of smell is of less importance
Than a sense of balance, walking on clouds
Through holes in which you can see the earth
Like a rich man through the eye of a needle.
The mind has its own level to find.
The Maker
So he said then: I will make the poem,
I will make it now. He took pencil,
The mind’s cartridge, and blank paper,
And drilled his thoughts to the slow beat
Of the blood’s drum; and there it formed
On the white surface and went marching
Onward through time, while the spent cities
And dry hearts smoked in its wake.
A Line from St David’s
I am sending you this letter,
Something for neo-Edwardians
Of a test-tube age to grow glum about
In their conditioned libraries.
As I came here by way of Plwmp,
There were hawkweeds in the hedges;
Nature had invested all her gold
In the industry of the soil.
There were larks, too, like a fresh chorus
Of dew, and I thought, remembering Dewi
The water-drinker, the way back
Is not so far as the way forward.
Here the cathedral’s bubble of stone
Is still unpricked by the mind’s needle,
And the wall lettuce in the crevices
Is as green now as when Giraldus
Altered the colour of his thought
By drinking from the Welsh fountain ...
I ramble; what I wanted to say
Was that the day has a blue lining
Partly of sky, partly of sea;
That the old currents are in the grass,
Though rust has becalmed the plough.
Somewhere a man sharpens a scythe;
A child watches him from the brink
Of his own speech, and this is of more
Importance than all the visitors keeping
A spry saint asleep in his tomb.
Country Cures
There are places, where you might have been sent
To learn patience, to make your soul
In long hours by the poor light
Of a few, pale leaves on a tree
In autumn or a flower in spring;
Lost parishes, where the grass keeps
No register and life is bare
Of all but the cold fact of the wind.
I know those places and the lean men,
Whose collars fasten them by the neck
To loneliness; as I go by,
I hear them pacing from room to room
Of their gaunt houses; or see their white
Faces setting on a blank day.
Funeral
They stand about conversing
In dark clumps, less beautiful than trees.
What have they come here to mourn?
There was a death, yes; but death’s brother,
Sin, is of more importance.
Shabbily the teeth gleam,
Sharpening themselves on reputations
That were firm once. On the cheap coffin
The earth falls more cleanly than tears.
What are these red faces for?
This incidence of pious catarrh
At the grave’s edge? He has returned
Where he belongs; this is acknowledged
By all but the lonely few
Making amends for the heart’s coldness
He had from them, grudging a little
The simple splendour of the wreath
Of words the church lays on him.
; To a Young Poet
For the first twenty years you are still growing,
Bodily that is; as a poet, of course,
You are not born yet. It’s the next ten
You cut your teeth on to emerge smirking
For your brash courtship of the muse.
You will take seriously those first affairs
With young poems, but no attachments
Formed then but come to shame you,
When love has changed to a grave service
Of a cold queen.
From forty on
You learn from the sharp cuts and jags
Of poems that have come to pieces
In your crude hands how to assemble
With more skill the arbitrary parts
Of ode or sonnet, while time fosters
A new impulse to conceal your wounds
From her and from a bold public,
Given to pry.
You are old now
As years reckon, but in that slower
World of the poet you are just coming
To sad manhood, knowing the smile
On her proud face is not for you.
Sorry
Dear parents,
I forgive you my life,
Begotten in a drab town,
The intention was good;
Passing the street now,
I see still the remains of sunlight.
It was not the bone buckled;
You gave me enough food
To renew myself.
It was the mind’s weight
Kept me bent, as I grew tall.
It was not your fault.
What should have gone on,
Arrow aimed from a tried bow
At a tried target, has turned back,
Wounding itself
With questions you had not asked.
Becoming
Not for long.
After the dark
The dawning.
After the first light
The sun.
After the calm the wind,
Creasing the water.
After the silence
Sound,
Sound of the wild birds,
And movement,
The fox and the hare.
And all these at one,
Part of the tearless content
Of the eye’s lens.
But over the sunlight
Shadow
Of the first man.
Welsh